THE 21st CENTURY HAS NO GREATEST POET...yet

We can make a case for the “best poet” of the 20th century, I suppose, because the century is over and we have the advantage of hindsight. We can survey the poets, the styles, the innovations, the philosophical and spiritual posturing, the aesthetic manifestos, and the assorted claims made on behalf of one writer or another. We can establish some reasonable criteria, provided we don't mistake them for commandments handed down from Mount Parnassus. Even so, we're left with an overwhelming number of writers whose work matters to the literature of the period. So far, so good. Then the trouble starts.The question of who is the best poet, writer, or playwright carries a rather large piece of unexamined baggage: the assumption that the contestants are playing roughly the same game. They aren't. Ethnicity, cultural upbringing, education, gender (yes, gender), race, sexual orientation, and, most importantly, style and technique all enter the picture. We might pretend these are minor variations on a common theme, but that would require a certain determination not to notice what's going on. How, exactly, do we propose to compare writers whose ideas of what poetry is, what it does, and what it might accomplish are fundamentally different?

Poetry, after all, is one of the oldest forms of literary expression. It didn't begin with the English Romantics, the French Symbolists, or some American professor's discovery that the line break could be used to justify a career. The European traditions inherited by Americans from their former colonial masters represent a fraction of the world's poetic inheritance. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of traditions, each with its own styles, cultural origins, politics, cosmologies, theological conceits, and technical possibilities. Languages themselves have expressive properties that cannot always be carried intact from one tongue to another. These are not incidental complications. They are the subject.And the complications keep multiplying. Writers who were once consigned to the margins, where the literary establishment could safely ignore them, have entered the conversation. Their work brings different histories, assumptions, and aesthetic priorities to the table. Suddenly, the question of what constitutes a good poem, much less a great poet, becomes considerably more difficult to settle. Whole libraries could be devoted to the subject, and even then we'd have to leave a few things out. The idea that we can sort this unruly abundance into a neat little hierarchy, award the gold medal, and go home happy is appealing mostly to people who like their literary judgments prepackaged.

Besides, declaring one poet the best of a given period means excluding an enormous number of writers and poetic traditions that are vital, interesting, and important to the expression of experiences that might otherwise remain anonymous. Some of these writers may have little in common with the poets we've been taught to admire. Some may not even agree with our definition of poetry. Tough luck for them, I suppose. The judges have spoken.

Here's a more sensible proposition: admit that you're speaking from a particular position, name your favorite poet, and make your case. Explain why this writer matters to you. Tell us what the poems do, how they work, where they succeed, and why you keep coming back to them. You don't have to pretend to have read everything ever written about poetics, nor do you have to produce a dissertation before you're permitted to express an opinion. You do, however, have to offer something more substantial than a declaration of personal taste followed by a shrug.

Call it “heroic criticism.” The heroism involved is modest but real: the willingness to make a judgment without pretending to possess the final word, to defend a writer without demanding that everyone else fall into line. A critic may have only a passing familiarity with the academic conversation surrounding poetry and still produce an intelligent, nuanced argument, provided the argument is grounded in an attentive encounter with the work itself.The point isn't to abandon judgment. It's to stop confusing judgment with ranking. Tell us who matters to you and why. Make the case. If you can return a poet to the reader's life as something more than a name on a syllabus or a candidate for some imaginary literary championship, you've accomplished something worth doing. And you won't have had to declare anybody the greatest poet of the century to do it.

All my friends are going to be strangers

Eliot's Escape from Emotion

In his 1933 book The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, T.S. Eliot wrote "poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world."  

Eliot was a marvelous, brilliant, subtle poet who saw the 20th century as a place where traditions were shattered to bits by world wars , revolutions and technology and tried to create a poetry that was dually a means of expressing the loss of authorative certainity and a means to piece the world back together where Old Traditions might thrive and better the human condition as a whole. That is pretty vague right there, I admit, but so was Eliot when it came to theorizing about what a poet should actually be trying to do when composing his or her stanzas. But do I agree with what he suggests in the the quote? would agree, yes, generally, but I would also say that good poems, good art can help the mind join a person’s random collection of half processed and ill-remembered experiences and produce a feeling —sensual, spiritual, political, romantic, philosophical—can did exist within the person prior to reading and considering a poet’s (or artist’s) work. 

Much of the time I believe poems, when they are good and evocative , from the pen of a master, can cleave together, the dissociated bits of memories and create a new sensation. It is often said that a poet , novelist, songwriter writes and finishes their individual projects because they want to find out what happens, to discover how it ends.

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MY BOMBASTIC HOT TAKE ABOUT OPEN READINGS CIRCA 1989 -95

 

I stopped going to open readings about twelve years ago for a combination of reasons, lack of time foremost among them, but coming in a close second was the weariness of being subjected to a continuous stream of encrypted banality. 

Not to grind this axe too long or too loudly, what is most striking about the assembled grossness of these overreaching testaments is that no one seems to have had an interesting take on the muse-inspiring incident that happened to them. Too often, the epiphanic moment drives the earnest amateur deep into the Archive of the Already Said Too Often. This dampens my enthusiasm for the notion that an introduction to good poets and their work will, by default, improve and hone the attributes of a readership that would likewise enjoy contemplating existence in unique combinations of metaphor and simile.Rather than broadening the perspective, as one might hope, many become entrenched in bad ideas. It's like a cold one can't quite get rid of, I guess, finally going away after rest and a vacation from taking one's seriousness too seriously. But the bad taste also acts like a virus, incubating for quite a while and affecting the senses in ways that seem to produce an irreversible tendency toward grandiloquence, truism, bathos, and rugged individualism.Some of this is inevitable in the course of being human, with our conceit that we are sensitive creatures with something to say. God knows I am an insufferable jerk when it comes to the sanctity of my own poetry, which is, let us say, looking increasingly hokey as I get older. But if poetry is doing its job, the reader should have the sense that some fact, independent of the narrator's expectations, has been acknowledged, and that the speaker is ready to change their thinking.Yet another reason I gave up doing public readings as a matter of habit: my good poems are few, really, and repeating them bores the fuck out of me.The sort of tract many readers come across in airports and on the shelves of bookstore self-help sections resembles a poem less than it resembles knotted strings of refitted clichés, lacking irony or circumstantial variation.

These are things one says after an accompanying string of disasters and disappointments that work not to comprehend experience, and perhaps gain some perspective on why things don't go according to plan, but rather to rationalize and reinforce one's attitude and manner of moving through the world. When all is said and done, Frank Sinatra said the same thing, but with more style and less pop-psyche cant: “I did it my way.” Not that Sinatra's cratered croon makes this a desirable way to go through life.We are who we are, sure, but a large part of being human is our capacity to change our behavior based on experience. Existence is not something you experience passively, or an event that merely happens to you. It is something you participate in.One is powerless to control the final outcomes of events, but within the larger picture we can change our actions. We can change the way we think. We do, more often than not, influence the results.

Such poets come across as defeatists in a Hemingway ammo belt.Poetry is fun when it is good.This was not good.Those who write poems, I think, are obliged to write the poems they are able to write, whatever their style, and they ought not be surprised when they are criticized for using clichés and glittering generalities in place of real craft or inspiration. One's innermost thoughts, of themselves, are often not interesting as poetry. Whether the young poet admits it or not, they have a responsibility to express their inner lives in a fresh way that is interesting to readers in the outer world.Small thoughts are perfectly fine. One need only inspect Emily Dickinson, or the imagist poems of Pound or Williams, for examples.

Even the “less than earth-shaking” poem has a bar to reach; it should nonetheless be exquisitely expressed. Those who participate in their lives are not passive. They are engaged with them.Even the shy, weak, infirm, modest, and laconic among us take proactive roles in the directions we take and assume some responsibility for them.Most of all, there is the capacity to remain teachable, to learn from experience and change behavior and mindset. This is what keeps people interesting and useful to their fellows.Those who refuse to change their ways, who use experience merely as rationale for reinforcing ineffective methods of coping with existence, are dull and self-infatuated much of the time. It's safe to say that they are poor on social skills and social cues both. Not you nor your friends like being around these personalities, yet somehow they keep showing up at the readings and other occasions where only the proper people are in attendence. But that's the life were stuck with. Boring people, bad luck and a variety of bad meals served in pricy cafes are the the existence we have. Such is the material the best poetry is made of. 

THE BOTTOM LINE ON JIM MORRISON'S VALUE AS AN ARTIST

Sometimes I get asked this question, may because I'm an old guy now who remembers the midnight bull sessions appraising the worth of pop stars: Was Jim Morrison really all that?The Doors were a mixed bag for me; the first two albums are among the most important rock albums of all time, with the remainder alternating between the proverbial poles of brilliance and balderdash. As a band, they were simply sublime and unique, with the odd combination of blues, flamenco, classical, jazz, Artaud and epic theater being crafted in their hands to create a sound and feel that was singular and instantly identifiable. 

 As a vocalist, Jim Morrison was often as evocative as the greatest fans proclaim, and it fit the half-awake twilight that seemed to be his constant state of consciousness. As a poet, though, I thought he was simply awful, fragmented, crypto-mystic surrealism that, save for some striking and memorable lines, collapsed from its flimsy elisions and obtuse vagaries. In his posthumous collections,, the pieces read too often like the notebook jottings of an introspective 17-year-old. I say that as one who was an introspective 17 year and is now an introspective 65-year-old. But the front man's low baritone had a rumbling, mulled-over quality that made even the worst images he wrote sound urgent. 

 It wasn't an uncommon habit of young aspiring poets of the day to pour over album lyric sheets provided by bands in an effort to discern deeply embedded meanings. It was a search for knowledge, another ageless activity among the species, and one can offer from experience that curious and impatient teens wanted it revealed at once, right now, immediately. Morrison's stoned swagger and crooning mysticism seemed just the man to serve up to an impatient that was in a hurry to grow up, or, altenately, given the singer's ongoing fascination with death, didn't want to grow up at all. Apocalypse now, right? Morrison might have become the poet he wanted to be had he been able to write, edit, and finesse his work as he desired when he left for Paris. What I will say, though, is that being the vocalist in the Doors gave him the opportunity to go through his writings, his poems, and select many of the stronger passages for the band's more theatrical songs. The Doors, ironically seemed to be an institutional editor for Morrison's words, forcing the bard to decide which of his jottings was actually the most powerful, concise, emphatic.

CREAM WERE NOT JAZZ PLAYERS, BUT THEY JAM THE CRAP OUT OF TWO CHORDS

 

Tonight I was too hot and bored with the what the streaming services had online, a situation that often gives me a hankering for something loud ,distorted, tones that are full expressions of violently playful impulses. Do I have issues? Likely. But I am putting this version up because someone had to; what I like here isn't how much Cream replicates bluesor achieves some nuanced suggestion of emotion, but rather how these instrumentalists--a blues guitarist with no jazz technique whatsoever and two jazz musicians constantly battling it out for who play the busiest business in a live set--but rather how far they were able to stretch this two-chord song into a sixteen improvisation that is, on its own terms, brilliant.

It's about sound, interweaving of guitar, bass and drums, picking up rhythmic cues and tempo changes, at times leaving all resemblance of the song behind and achieving a sort of heaven of pentatonic riffing. Some find this repetitive, and so be it; it's my kind of repetition, like Fillmore Live Miles Davis. Alive, raw, exploratory, nasty, brutal and extended. Jack Bruce and Ginger, bass and drums of Cream, had fairly extensive jazz experience and , as it goes, had a better variety of improvisational approaches to extensive jamming than did Clapton, who was and remains a stylish blues guitarist with limited vocabulary. Bruce has said that he and Baker wanted Clapton to be their Ornette Coleman, and to say the least they challenged the guitarist to rise to the occasion by playing the tunes anywhich way but loose. Clapton never soared magically into jazzy excursions, but what's exciting is to listen to him push his style to the limits.

His playing was never as sharp, blazing or responsive to ideas being thrown at him since Cream broke up. Listening to these searing phrases, repetitive as they are against the rhythm riot perpetrated by Bruce and Baker, makes my senses dance. My issues, so called, are sweetly asleep for the night.

BLUE CHEER AND THE FEEDBACK THAT ENDED REALITY

 It's claimed more often than not that Black Sabbath created heavy metal, a not unreasonable assumption, but I would argue the honor belong's to San Francisco's Blue Cheer. BC's brand of amplified raunch first came on us in 1966 with the release of their initial album Vincebus Eruptum. BS's first release was later, in 1970, and later still in the U.S. Both bands were universally reviled when they respectively appeared, and it was a while later, in waves of reconsideration and nostalgia, that both bands are given more credit for what they did. Blue Cheer has been one of my guilty pleasures for years, fast, atonal, loud enough to be made to record at the end of a San Francisco pier , amps aimed at the Bay, or playing so loud at a free concert that a dog keeled over and died. Their folklore spoke volumes as loud as their first two records.

It wasn't hip at all to like Blue Cheer when their 1968 debut, Vincebus Eruptum, was released. It was the usual accusations as the established critics expressed their disgust: out of tune, unable to play their instruments, unbelievably bad imitations of Hendrix and Cream. Some of us liked what these three guys were doing, though. I liked them precisely for the reason that others hated them: for being atonal, loud, full of feedback, distorted in ways that had nothing to do with conventional ideas of texture and musical color and everything to do with making you aware of the nature of the sound, which was sheer electricity wielded by some angry and impatient men eager to make a noise where there had previously been stultifying silence. Blue Cheer was the perfect band for the coming age of speed freakery. The chemical essence wants to take things apart and then reassemble them rapidly, haphazardly, inspired and excited momentarily by new combinations of components to be had from that which was gutted. Like it or not, something new was occurring here, and it was something that could only happen if the players—Dickie Peterson, bass and vocals; Leigh Stephens, guitar; Paul Whaley, drums—had more than a competent grasp of their instruments.

I was introduced to the solar skronk and abrasive swing of Sun Ra at the time through many visits to the Grande Ballroom and developed a taste for the mind-fuckery of free jazz that came from Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Ayler, and Coleman. It helped that WABX, the FM underground station in Detroit, played some Black avant-garde music. So I found similarities between what Blue Cheer was doing and the esteemed Black musicians who may have influenced them. The band may well have had no idea of what they were doing conceptually, and the conceit is mine alone. Still, all the same, Blue Cheer handily deconstructed the entire power-trio format, pushing into its three- or four-chord limit with long jams that were groaning, grainy, belching, aggressive, nonlinear improvisations keyed to emotion alone.

They were to the power trio what Neal Cassady was to drive. I consider Dick Peterson an able, if not great, bassist. Still, unquestionably, he was one of the most terrific white-blues screamers of all time—his singing was rage, self-pity, and uncontrollable impulse fused in each frayed, corrosive syllable he spat out. His bandsaw-on-steel vocals, joined with guitarist Leigh Stephens' PULVERIZING ATONAL GUITAR SOLOS and drummer Paul Whaley's trash-can demolition, laid the groundwork for a generation of metal and punk bands to come: MC5, STOOGES, MOUNTAIN, LED ZEP, RAMONES, MOTORHEAD, DEAD BOYS. Even the Velvet Underground, with their feedback skronk, couldn't match Blue Cheer's steel-belted forays into electrified abandon; the Velvets merely taunted the strings of their guitars, while Blue Cheer sounded like they punched holes in oil tankers. And Peterson's vocalizations were the perfect match: screech, rasp, and banshee wail all rolled into one bag of verbal outrage, maintaining a punk's slouch. His was the rusty yowl that deserved to be praised and dreaded for the unflinching combination of fear and rage it represented.

Leigh Stephens' broadsides were genuinely beautiful cascades of dissonance, pulverizing atonal breaks, the emphasis on pulverizing. I saw these guys at the Grande as well. It seems to me, thinking about it decades later, that this was not a man of sub-competence flailing and noodling about the frets, but someone who knew what he wanted to sound like and could get the result he desired, and that he was someone who could duplicate that sound on command. Paul Whaley, in turn, had the most expansive, most enormous, most sledgehammer-like drumming style of the period. His sound was of every building and bridge that ever collapsed under its own weight. This is to say that I think the first two Blue Cheer albums need to be reconsidered.

WHAT IS TO be DONE?!?

 O

Well,what should a writer do?Well, you have to stop sometimes so you can appreciate what the senses have given you as you go your way through the world . You have to stop in order to write about the need to pursue the seductive logic of never stopping . But you have to stop before you go forward, as the brain absorbs only so much ; you stop , you breathe, you think, you connect what has happened recently with the narrative of a life already recorded.

 This engages you with the world, truly, this is where the poetry comes from, not gushing hot lava adjectives and verbs while writing that the world is made more real by moving forward, with out apology, without pause or reflection, following the string where ever it leads. But this is not poetry and it is not lyricism. The writer in those times they stop agitating the gravel and take pause to reflect, meditate, consider the thingness of the world they’ve blazed through a little too quickly, there arises the sense that one forgets that they are a writer, the self-appointed priest of making things happen on the fly; the writing becomes about the world , the people, the places, the things that occupy the same space as you, the same patch of land your visiting. It becomes less about the writer, the seeker of knowledge attempting to gain knowledge through velocity , the impatient explorer more concerned with inflaming their senses rather than being genuinely curious about and teachable within the world. 

You have to stop , take a breath, create a language, a poetry, a prose style that convinces the reader that they’ve actually encountered something extraordinary in their travels through hill and dale, river and inlet, village and burg, that they’ve actually learned something they didn’t know before. Otherwise , I believe, nothing is revealed because nothing was learned and, despite all manner of ranting and such protests defending one’s unique view, that view is forgotten and another opportunity is lost to move a reader in ways you might not have expected.

Wall of Voodoo genius paen to sexual incompetence

Wall of Voodoo was an underrated band, and Stan Ridgway was one of its genuinely intriguing figures. “Can’t Make Love” may be the best song I’ve encountered about male sexual awkwardness: introspection, fear of intimacy disguised as aggressive bravado, and the peculiar desperation of a man who wants connection while doing everything he can to prevent it.The lyric, delivered in the first person, seems to change direction with every line, as though the speaker is arguing with himself while trying to maintain some semblance of control. That is what makes it so convincing. This isn’t the familiar pop-song version of romantic difficulty, where the troubled guy eventually figures things out and gets the girl. There is no resolution here. He may eventually break out of the negative spiral and find some possibility of happiness in a relationship grounded in the real world, or he may remain trapped inside his own defenses. Ridgway leaves the question hanging.

His performance is crucial. His flat, trembling declarations sound almost emotionally neutral until you hear what’s underneath them: fear, embarrassment, desire, hostility, and the need to appear less vulnerable than he actually is. The angular rhythms and jagged accents don’t merely accompany him; they give the music an unstable architecture that mirrors the personality in the lyric. Everything is slightly out of alignment.

What makes “Can’t Make Love” so powerful is the contradiction at its center. The aggressive male persona is revealed as a defense against vulnerability. The bravado isn’t confidence; it’s fear wearing a leather jacket. Ridgway understands something that most songs about male sexuality miss: the man who seems most determined to assert himself may be the one least capable of surrendering control.I’ve heard plenty of songs about sex, desire, loneliness, and male insecurity. Very few get this close to the uncomfortable machinery underneath them. This world is askew and viewed askance. The combination of a fragile, defeatist personality and awkward tempos makes me think of the self-destructive machines of Jean Tinguely—sculptures that seemed designed not to accomplish anything useful but to destroy themselves. Auto-destruction as art.The same thing happens in “Can’t Make Love.” The more Ridgway talks about the hole he’s in, the deeper the pit gets. The song keeps moving, but it doesn’t seem to get anywhere.

I think “Can’t Make Love” is genius. If not genius, let’s settle for quirky, concisely confessional and somewhat danceable.

STYLE CHOSE ME

How did I choose a form that provided the best structure, style, and tone for the poems I write? Good question. Always a good question. The honest answer is that I don’t think I chose a style at all. And I’m not going to reverse the usual formulation and say that the style chose me. That sounds clever, but it isn’t really true either.What happened was less deliberate and, I think, more useful. I wrote. I tried different ways of writing. I imitated poets I admired. I wrote bad poems, naïve poems, self-indulgent poems, poems that were much too pleased with themselves. I wrote poems that sounded like somebody else because, at the time, I hadn’t yet figured out what sounded like me.There is always something slightly suspect about an artist explaining his or her own process. It can make the whole business sound more calculated than it really is, as if the poet sits down with a set of instructions and consciously manufactures a poem. I don’t work that way. I don’t begin with a theory of poetry, decide on a form, and then fill it with appropriate material. I generally don’t know exactly where I’m going. But I’ve learned something about how to get there.

For me, style was an accumulation of choices made over a long period of time. I gradually discovered what I didn’t want: too much decoration, too much explanation, too much obvious significance, too much of the poet standing in front of the poem announcing how important it was. I became increasingly interested in language that could be direct without being simple, strange without being obscure, and suggestive without explaining itself to death.That meant learning to trust the material. An image didn’t always need to symbolize something. A line didn’t have to announce its importance. Sometimes a poem could simply put two things next to each other and let the tension between them do the work. I became less interested in producing a recognizable “poetic” effect and more interested in finding the right arrangement of words, images, rhythms, and interruptions.

So I suppose what I arrived at was a habit of compositional mind rather than a particular style or form. The poems became, ideally, less pretentious, more direct, more honest. Not necessarily more autobiographical or confessional, but less interested in pretending to know more than I actually knew. I learned to let uncertainty remain uncertainty.A friend, Paul Dresman, who recently passed away and was himself one of the best poets I ever had the pleasure to know, helped me understand this. Paul insisted that revision was not an afterthought but a central part of the craft. Poetry was an art, he reminded me, no less than painting, music, sculpture, or any other form of composition. The poem on the page was not necessarily the poem you had written first. It was the poem you discovered through revision.

That distinction became important to me. I had assumed, as many beginning writers probably do, that the most exciting thing in a poem was also likely to be the most important. Paul taught me to be suspicious of that assumption. Sometimes the line you love most is the line that has to go. Sometimes the cleverest image is getting in the way. Sometimes what seems like the poem’s great idea is precisely what is keeping the poem from becoming a poem.

Revision, then, became less a matter of correcting mistakes than of removing interference. You take away what is unnecessary until the images, sounds, associations, and ideas that actually belong to the poem have room to exist. The goal isn't to make the poem more impressive. It is to make it more itself.That process is still going on. I don’t think a poet ever finally arrives at a style and locks the door behind him. You keep writing, keep failing, keep disc
overing things, and occasionally you stumble onto something that feels right. You recognize it because it doesn't seem manufactured. It has its own necessity.

So how did I choose the form, structure, style, and tone of my poems?

ALL IFS ARE BIG

 
Mark Costello's novel Big If is a superb and unforgiving comedy of American life involving a low-level Secret Service agent who must get reacquainted with her estranged computer-genius brother when she takes a respite from the paranoid twists and turns of her nerve-rattling job. This is a book of richly skewed characters doing their best to make sense of their lives, or at least have their lives take on a fleeting semblance of normality. The quests, individual and collective, aren't what anyone would expect—this novel takes a hard left turn from the Anne Tyler/Paulo Coelho fictions that insert everyday mysticism into the complications of city life—and the results are habits, tics, behaviors, and alienation from self that come close to home, in the heart of the nest: the bedroom, the dining room, the kitchen, the places one lives the most and gains small satisfactions or walls themselves off to unreachable Siberias of the psyche.

In many ways, this is one of the best novels to investigate what one might do in the absence of God, or even a convenient social construction of The Public Good. All points of reference in Big If are minimized and negotiated from relevance. Costello's prose is alive with the things of our life, and is superb at demonstrating the clash between the happiness material items promise and the world that denies such rewards. He is the master of setting forth a metaphor and letting it travel through a storyline just beneath the surface, operating silently, mostly invisibly, always effectively.

Their father, in the first portion of the book, is a moderate Republican insurance investigator of scholarly reading habits who happens to be a principled atheist. You cannot have both insurance, the practice of placing a monetary remuneration on unavoidable disaster, and assurance, which has religion promising protection from evil and disaster. The children, in turn, assume careers that seem to typify the dualism their father opposed, son Jens becoming a programmer for the Big If online game for which he writes "monster behavior code" that attempts to outsmart human players and have them meet a hypothetical destruction. Daughter Vi, conversely, becomes a Secret Service agent, schooled in the theory encoded in The Certainties, a set of writings that lays out the details, nuances, and psychology of extreme protection. These are world views in collision, and Costello's prose is quick with the telling detail, the flashing insight, the cutting remark.

The problem, of course, is that no one can define what "good" is. Big If is quite good, and what makes it work is that Costello accomplishes the dual difficulty of handing us a small-town/suburban comedy the likes of John Cheever would have admired, while also providing the rich detailing of the other Secret Service agents who work with Vi Asplund. There is something of a domestic comedy seamlessly interwoven with a skewed Washington thriller, with the elements of each spilling over and coloring the underlying foundations of both. In the first part of the novel, we have an atheist Republican insurance investigator who has a habit of crossing out the "God" in the "In God We Trust" inscription on all his paper money, replacing the offending word with "us." Vi, years later, winds up in a job where "in us we trust" is the operating rationale, as she and her fellow agents strive to protect their protected from the happenstance of crowds, acting out intricate theories and assumptions that can only be tested in the field. Costello is wonderful at the heightened awareness in the ways he presents his details, his comic touches. A beautiful agent who still receives alimony checks from her smitten ex-husband carries on a correspondence with him via the memo line of the checks, where he continually writes "come back to me." She writes "No, never" each time, deposits the check, knowing that her ex will see the reply when he receives the canceled checks.

The book is full of these fine touches. We have a sense that it's the small things, the small frustrations as much as the larger disasters, that conspire against our happiness. On view in Big If are different models on which characters try to contain, control, or explain the relentless capriciousness of Life as it unfolds, constructs through which characters and the country and culture they serve can feel empowered to control their fate in a meaningful universe. The punchline is that Life goes on anyway, with its fluctuating, undulating, chaotic dynamics that only occasionally seem to fall into place. Costello wrests a subtle comedy of manners from the small failures of anyone's world view to suitably make their existence unproblematic. This is a family comedy on a par with The Wapshot Chronicle, but in an America that is suddenly global, an air that makes even the most familiar things seem alien and fantastic.